C++ Interview
On the 1st of January, 1998, Bjarne Stroustrup gave an interview
to the IEEE's 'Computer' magazine.
Naturally, the editors thought he would be giving a retrospective
view of seven years of object-oriented design, using the language
he created.
By the end of the interview, the interviewer got more than he had
bargained for and, subsequently, the editor decided to suppress
its contents, 'for the good of the industry' but, as with many of
these things, there was a leak.
Here is a complete transcript of what was was said, unedited, and
unrehearsed, so it isn't as neat as planned interviews.
You will find it interesting...
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Interviewer: Well, it's been a few years since you changed the
world of software design. How does it feel,
looking back?
Stroustrup: Actually, I was thinking about those days, just
before you arrived. Do you remember? Everyone
was writing 'C' and, the trouble was, they were
pretty damn good at it. Universities got pretty
good at teaching it, too. They were turning out
competent - I stress the word 'competent' -
graduates at a phenomenal rate. That's what
caused the problem.
Interviewer: Problem?
Stroustrup: Yes, problem. Remember when everyone wrote
COBOL?
Interviewer: Of course, I did, too.
Stroustrup: Well, in the beginning, these guys were like
demi-gods. Their salaries were high, and they
were treated like royalty.
Interviewer: Those were the days, eh?
Stroustrup: Right. So what happened? IBM got sick of it,
and invested millions in training programmers,
till they were a dime a dozen.
Interviewer: That's why I got out. Salaries dropped within a
year, to the point where being a journalist
actually paid better.
Stroustrup: Exactly. Well, the same happened with 'C'
programmers.
Interviewer: I see, but what's the point?
Stroustrup: Well, one day, when I was sitting in my office, I
thought of this little scheme, which would
redress the balance a little. I thought 'I
wonder what would happen, if there were a
language so complicated, so difficult to learn,
that nobody would ever be able to swamp the
market with programmers?
Actually, I got some of the ideas from X10, you
know, X windows. That was such a bitch of a
graphics system, that it only just ran on those
Sun 3/60 things. They had all the ingredients
for what I wanted. A really ridiculously complex
syntax, obscure functions, and pseudo-OO
structure. Even now, nobody writes raw X-windows
code. Motif is the only way to go if you want to
retain your sanity.
Interviewer: You're kidding...?
Stroustrup: Not a bit of it. In fact, there was another
problem. Unix was written in 'C', which meant
that any 'C' programmer could very easily become
a systems programmer. Remember what a mainframe
systems programmer used to earn?
Interviewer: You bet I do, that's what I used to do.
Stroustrup: OK, so this new language had to divorce itself
from Unix, by hiding all the system calls that
bound the two together so nicely. This would
enable guys who only knew about DOS to earn a
decent living too.
Interviewer: I don't believe you said that...
Stroustrup: Well, it's been long enough, now, and I believe
most people have figured out for themselves that
C++ is a waste of time but, I must say, it's
taken them a lot longer than I thought it would.
Interviewer: So how exactly did you do it?
Stroustrup: It was only supposed to be a joke, I never
thought people would take the book seriously.
Anyone with half a brain can see that
object-oriented programming is counter-intuitive,
illogical and inefficient.
Interviewer: What?
Stroustrup: And as for 're-useable code' --- when did you
ever hear of a company re-using its code?
Interviewer: Well, never, actually, but...
Stroustrup: There you are then. Mind you, a few tried, in the
early days. There was this Oregon company ---
Mentor Graphics, I think they were called --- really
caught a cold trying to rewrite everything in C++
in about '90 or '91. I felt sorry for them
really, but I thought people would learn from
their mistakes.
Interviewer: Obviously, they didn't?
Stroustrup: Not in the slightest. Trouble is, most companies
hush-up all their major blunders, and explaining
a $30 million loss to the shareholders would have
been difficult. Give them their due, though,
they made it work in the end.
Interviewer: They did? Well, there you are then, it proves
O-O works.
Stroustrup: Well, almost. The executable was so huge, it
took five minutes to load, on an HP workstation,
with 128MB of RAM. Then it ran like molasses.
Actually, I thought this would be a major
stumbling-block, and I'd get found out within a
week, but nobody cared. Sun and HP were only too
glad to sell enormously powerful boxes, with huge
resources just to run trivial programs. You
know, when we had our first C++ compiler, at
AT&T, I compiled 'Hello World', and couldn't
believe the size of the executable. 2.1MB
Interviewer: What? Well, compilers have come a long way,
since then.
Stroustrup: They have? Try it on the latest version of g++ -
you won't get much change out of half a megabyte.
Also, there are several quite recent examples for
you, from all over the world. British Telecom
had a major disaster on their hands but, luckily,
managed to scrap the whole thing and start again.
They were luckier than Australian Telecom. Now I
hear that Siemens is building a dinosaur, and
getting more and more worried as the size of the
hardware gets bigger, to accommodate the
executables. Isn't multiple inheritance a joy?
Interviewer: Yes, but C++ is basically a sound language.
Stroustrup: You really believe that, don't you? Have you
ever sat down and worked on a C++ project?
Here's what happens: First, I've put in enough
pitfalls to make sure that only the most trivial
projects will work first time.
Take operator overloading. At the end of the
project, almost every module has it, usually,
because guys feel they really should do it, as it
was in their training course. The same operator
then means something totally different in every
module. Try pulling that lot together, when you
have a hundred or so modules.
And as for data hiding, God, I sometimes can't
help laughing when I hear about the problems
companies have making their modules talk to each
other. I think the word 'synergistic' was
specially invented to twist the knife in a
project manager's ribs.
Interviewer: I have to say, I'm beginning to be quite appalled
at all this. You say you did it to raise
programmers' salaries? That's obscene.
Stroustrup: Not really. Everyone has a choice. I didn't
expect the thing to get so much out of hand.
Anyway, I basically succeeded. C++ is dying off
now, but programmers still get high salaries -
especially those poor devils who have to maintain
all this crap. You do realise, it's impossible
to maintain a large C++ software module if you
didn't actually write it?
Interviewer: How come?
Stroustrup: You are out of touch, aren't you? Remember the
typedef?
Interviewer: Yes, of course.
Stroustrup: Remember how long it took to grope through the
header files only to find that 'RoofRaised' was a
double precision number? Well, imagine how long
it takes to find all the implicit typedefs in all
the Classes in a major project.
Interviewer: So how do you reckon you've succeeded?
Stroustrup: The universities haven't been teaching 'C' for
such a long time, there's now a shortage of
decent 'C' programmers. Especially those who
know anything about Unix systems programming.
How many guys would know what to do with
'malloc', when they've used 'new' all these years
- and never bothered to check the return code.
In fact, most C++ programmers throw away their
return codes. Whatever happened to good ol'
'-1'? At least you knew you had an error,
without bogging the thing down in all that
'throw' 'catch' 'try' stuff.
Interviewer: But, surely, inheritance does save a lot of time?
Stroustrup: Does it? Have you ever noticed the difference
between a 'C' project plan, and a C++ project
plan? The planning stage for a C++ project is
three times as long. Precisely to make sure that
everything which should be inherited is, and what
shouldn't isn't. Then, they still get it wrong.
Whoever heard of memory leaks in a 'C' program?
Now finding them is a major industry. Most
companies give up, and send the product out,
knowing it leaks like a sieve, simply to avoid
the expense of tracking them all down.
Interviewer: There are tools....
Stroustrup: Most of which were written in C++.
Interviewer: If we publish this, you'll probably get lynched,
you do realise that?
Stroustrup: I doubt it. As I said, C++ is way past its peak
now, and no company in its right mind would start
a C++ project without a pilot trial. That should
convince them that it's the road to disaster. If
not, they deserve all they get. You know, I
tried to convince Dennis Ritchie to rewrite Unix
in C++.
Interviewer: Oh my God. What did he say?
Stroustrup: Well, luckily, he has a good sense of humor. I
think both he and Brian figured out what I was
doing, in the early days, but never let on. He
said he'd help me write a C++ version of DOS, if
I was interested.
Interviewer: Were you?
Stroustrup: Actually, I did write DOS in C++, I'll give you a
demo when we're through. I have it running on a
Sparc 20 in the computer room. Goes like a
rocket on 4 CPU's, and only takes up 70 megs of
disk.
Interviewer: What's it like on a PC?
Stroustrup: Now you're kidding. Haven't you ever seen
Windows '95? I think of that as my biggest
success. Nearly blew the game before I was
ready, though.
Interviewer: You know, that idea of a Unix++ has really got me
thinking. Somewhere out there, there's a guy
going to try it.
Stroustrup: Not after they read this interview.
Interviewer: I'm sorry, but I don't see us being able to
publish any of this.
Stroustrup: But it's the story of the century. I only want
to be remembered by my fellow programmers, for
what I've done for them. You know how much a C++
guy can get these days?
Interviewer: Last I heard, a really top guy is worth $70 - $80
an hour.
Stroustrup: See? And I bet he earns it. Keeping track of
all the gotchas I put into C++ is no easy job.
And, as I said before, every C++ programmer feels
bound by some mystic promise to use every damn
element of the language on every project.
Actually, that really annoys me sometimes, even
though it serves my original purpose. I almost
like the language after all this time.
Interviewer: You mean you didn't before?
Stroustrup: Hated it. It even looks clumsy, don't you agree?
But when the book royalties started to come in...
well, you get the picture.
Interviewer: Just a minute. What about references? You must
admit, you improved on 'C' pointers.
Stroustrup: Hmm. I've always wondered about that.
Originally, I thought I had. Then, one day I was
discussing this with a guy who'd written C++ from
the beginning. He said he could never remember
whether his variables were referenced or
dereferenced, so he always used pointers. He
said the little asterisk always reminded him.
Interviewer: Well, at this point, I usually say 'thank you
very much' but it hardly seems adequate.
Stroustrup: Promise me you'll publish this. My conscience is
getting the better of me these days.
Interviewer: I'll let you know, but I think I know what my
editor will say.
Stroustrup: Who'd believe it anyway? Although, can you send
me a copy of that tape?
Interviewer: I can do that.
